Comment and discussion on Valve Software’s digital communications platform.
A simple upgrade to the Steam Store has added Metacritic ratings to all games that have them. Metacritic aggregates reviews for various entertainment mediums, creating a final, averaged score that is typically about as unbiased as it gets.
The scores will help give consumers an idea of the quality of the games available from the Store. But can they really a substitute for a good demo?
Kuma\War made waves during its early days for its premise and goal: to provide an ongoing series of episodic missions covering real-life combat operations, created as soon as possible after they occur and made freely available.
As interesting as that premise is, the rapid execution it required coupled with developer Kuma Reality Games’ flimsy technology has kept the quality of the final product low, although good enough for the US military to use it as a communications training tool. Today’s announcement of a Source license for KRG could well mark a new start for the series.
“Kuma has been tremendously successful over the last two years, but we’re ready to move to the next generation of video games,” said Keith Halper, CEO, Kuma Reality Games. “By using Source, we’ll be able to create realistic characters for our upcoming episodic television-like products.”
Using their pioneering methodology and technology, Kuma develops and delivers games with unprecedented speed, making game episodes that reflect just-released TV shows or films, and real world events. These thoroughly unique user experiences present as powerful advertiser opportunity with unique audience characteristics.
Although the press release does not explicitly state that KRG will be using Steam, the extremely episodic nature of their work (twice a month) doesn’t leave much room for debate, save for the slim possibility that their entirely advertisement-driven business model has somehow forced them elsewhere.
I’m pretty bad at keeping up with The Escapist‘s weekly issues. Right now my inbox has a backlog of thirty unread articles from as early as January, and getting round to digesting them always seems to be more effort than it turns out to be. The Escapist’s team almost always deliver, as any of my fellow readers will tell you, and particularly pertinently with John Tynes’ 28th of February Contrarian column which I will be talking about today.
Despite my having no interest in role-playing whatsoever, the article articulates one of the largest problems I see both the persistent and indeed instanced online games of today suffering: the challenge of building a strong, flexible and navigable community. It is no longer enough to throw a forum together and expect people to make do. So significant is community strength that the success of platforms like the Xbox 360 is becoming defined by it, and with Wikification becoming an ever more relevant practice community spirit, or the lack of it, is going to affect more than the hard-core player base, and not just titles offering persistent worlds.
How can Steam help overcome these issues?
So far, Turtle Rock Studios’s work has consisted purely of contributions to Valve’s various Counter-Strike titles with maps and the official CS Bot making up the bulk of their portfolio. No more: yesterday the announcement went out for Turtle Rock’s ‘next-generation’ Source project, in which they are building a game ‘universe’. Make of that what you will, because it’s all there is to go on today.
“Working with Source and Steam allows us unprecedented flexibility in our development process, provides instantaneous world-wide distribution, and affords us the creative freedom to focus on building a game universe of our very own.” said Booth. “We’re excited to be working with this technology and to reveal more about the project over the coming year.”
One thing we can be sure of: the map design will be gorgeous!
You may remember xStream, Steam’s first true competitor (that is, a digital distribution platform that offers more than just the downloads) and the service to which 3D Realms has signed Prey. It’s been dormant for the best part of a year, but in early February a somewhat optimistic post was made on the practically empty community forums, wisely announcing that ‘xStream’ had been dropped and inviting users to choose a new name.
They’ve just had their first response, so I think it’s time for some publicity. After all, a bit of competition never hurt anyone! Head on over and see if you can help out.
I’ve really got to pay more attention to these resource files, Public/P2PDownload.res (thanks again, Andy) in particular. The form controls defined within the file leave no room for doubt that a P2P distribution system is being added to Steam, and very little that it is related to the “distribution system…for free content” mentioned both last September and more recently in 1UP’s ‘Mod Summit’ feature.
Following Valve’s 2003-2004/5 hiring of Bram Cohen the system seems likely to be based on his popular and open source BitTorrent software, where clients download pieces of data from other users connected to the server in exchange for parts of the file they have that the others do not, reducing (but not always eliminating) centralised server load. Steam using an implementation of BitTorrent would give an enormous boost to the popularity of legitimate P2P – as indeed would it using any P2P system.
While the driving idea behind the system is free and/or third-party content (i.e. mods), there can be no doubt that distributing content for official games peer-to-peer would also be beneficial. However, the required uploading would be another cause for complaints from those with bandwidth caps, or who just fancy any excuse to have a go. Don’t expect the content servers to disappear any time soon…
